It is my 2-year “aortaversary”. A funny word that is supposed to signify 2 years since they stopped my heart and fixed it. I write these blog posts a week or two in advance before I actually post them. It’s nice to just mull it over, think about what
I relish being bad at things. It is something I have repeated ad nauseam here and to everyone around me. To me, there is nothing more human and personal than just trying something. I have also been embracing “being cringe” for similar reasons. I wanted to make a post about
It is a weird thing to realise that you have been afraid for a long while, without the usual feelings of constant fear. It isn't the same feeling as being on the edge of a cliff, or standing in the middle of a busy road. It feels kind of normal.
Today, I read “Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling.” It’s a collection of 10-to 20-page essays on what cycling means to or has done for the writer. I quite liked it. If you see it in the bookshop, give it a pick up. The essays are very casual, but they’re
The tree lurched from another strike. Nearly there. The aggression of the last couple of minutes had left him short of breath, so he took a long breath in and out and stepped back. He figured 2 more hits, and it would be down. The tree would supply enough logs
It is currently the 5th of April 2025. I am sitting in bed at my hotel in Prague, with my laptop out after a week of roaming the streets of Europe. I have another two weeks of it ahead of me. This is being written after having read some pages
In 2013, I was a jobless 19 year old with no plan. To fill the days, I was regularly volunteering at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. It was a smaller charity at the time, but it still had loads of people donating all sorts of computing hardware and
Over the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about change. What it means to change as a person, and have change happen to you. Recently I bought a book about change. Made it through 20 odd pages before I decided it wasn’t for me. I don’
I have liked taking photos since I was a wee’un. Growing up with many disposable cameras in 90’s, digital for the next 20 years and then recently going back to good old analog photos in my 30’s. I love just pressing that shutter button and producing a
One of the things people pause to ask me when I tell my story about the aortic dissection is “Wait they just let you go after the A&E visit?”.
I can say now, now the year has passed, that 2024 was better than 2023. But it still strongly ranks in the top 3 worst years of my life. This post is a personal check-in for the start of 2025. A single blog post to put a retrospective of 2024
Last month was the Half-Life 2 20th anniversary (November 16th). This post is a boring retelling of how I played some games on a computer (who cares). But I wanted to write this, before one day I forget some of the details. And I get to talk about Team Fortress
It’s weird, I imagine the first question people ask their doctor when getting a medical diagnosis is how much time they have left. For me it was actually the second, after “It’s that bad huh?”. It’s also the first question I get asked when I tell people
In this post are a few mini-posts I’ve written in the last couple of months. They aren’t about anything in particular, and I think they are less interesting than full blown heart surgery posts. I’m treating this as a traditional online blog, full of thoughts someone might
When I was a teenager, I think I hated the idea of running. There was just always something cooler about riding a bike, or playing sport. Or actually playing something like playing tennis or badminton, a game. The thought of doing running leisurely felt weird to me. Anybody can run
Alt title: real world thoughts of the On-X Aortic Prosthesis after 11 months Content warning for this post: Suicide and self-harm. I’ve had a lot of thoughts over the last 11 months. They’ve been leaving a trail on my notes apps as I write them down whilst on